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Cheers and applause erupted again Friday evening in a Colden Hall classroom as a professional client announced the team of students who best met its needs during Northwest Missouri State University’s annual Knacktive course.
Knacktive, the interdisciplinary program that places advanced undergraduate students in an environment mimicking a digital media marketing agency, partnered this spring with St. Joseph Youth Alliance, a non-profit organization that develops programs and provides services for children and youth as well as young adults.
The organization tasked Knacktive with creating an awareness campaign aimed at combatting underage drinking and e-cigarette usage among youth between the ages of 10 and 21, specifically in Buchanan County.
St. Joseph Youth Alliance Executive Director Robin Hammond (right) and Julie Wiedmer, the organization's early childhood educator, announced their evaluations of the presentations Knacktive teams delivered for them Friday. (Photos by Lauren Adams/Northwest Missouri State University)
Members of the Dare Bears Knacktive team listened as St. Joseph Youth Alliance announced the results of their client pitches.
Ultimately, Youth Alliance leaders selected Dare Bears as its winning team. The team pitched a campaign with messaging focused on specific age groups as well as a redesigned website and an extensive social media campaign that included videos and spanned multiple platforms.
St. Joseph Youth Alliance Executive Director Robin Hammond praised the Knacktive teams for the time, thought and research they invested in not only the client’s requests but also in educating themselves about the topic of youth battling substance use. Youth Alliance leaders said they are likely to implement elements of each team’s campaign plans in their marketing.
“I’ve been doing this work for 27 years, so I know it’s not easy, and, overall, Youth Alliance in itself is a pretty hard concept to understand,” Hammond said to Knacktive students. “You didn’t get much coaching from us, and you all did a phenomenal job of really putting the pieces together and putting a well-rounded campaign together.”
Miranda Myles Jackson, an assistant professor of art and one of four Northwest faculty members serving as Knacktive instructors this spring, also commended the teams and noted Knacktive helps students develop the skills marketing agencies value when seeking employees. Throughout the semester, Knacktive students also have opportunities to hear directly from professionals in creative fields.
“They weren’t afraid to try new things and rely on their instincts,” Myles Jackson said of this year’s Knacktive class. “Even if we were saying, ‘Hey, maybe try this,’ and they were like, ‘I think we can get away with it.’ That’s good because we want them to start trusting their instincts.”
Brooklyn Bailey, a junior graphic design major from West Point, Nebraska, applied for Knacktive with hopes of gaining profession-based experience and was hired as the Dare Bears’ art director.
“Knacktive is an amazing program,” Bailey said. “I definitely feel it is real-world. You build such a team camaraderie with everyone you meet, and I always was curious about how most advertising teams worked together. Now that we went through the program, I definitely got insight into that.”
Bailey said the Knacktive experience translates knowledge she gained in previous coursework to real-world applications.
“I feel like this was almost a step up into like what the demands are, the timelines, how stuff has to be done within like a couple of days,” Bailey said. “I feel like the pressure of what it would be like was put on me. It was either you sink or you swim, and I definitely felt like we didn't sink. We actually swam. Those long nights paid off.”
Jesse Kilcoyne, a junior strategic advertising major from Oak Grove, Missouri, said he joined Knacktive to gain experience that could help him as a future media planner. He’ll acquire additional experience this summer during an internship with Bernstein-Rein, a Kansas City-based advertising company.
“There is so much that you can’t even think of until you actually experience this,” he said. “I thought that this was going to be just a little experience with a teacher. It was a lot more, and I'm very happy about it.”
Members of Dare Bears showed their "claws" after their team was announced as the winner of Knacktive's 2023 client pitch competition.
Knacktive is an elective course designed to replicate the creative demands and intense teamwork atmosphere of a technology-oriented, professional marketing and communication agency. Students are selected for the experience and actively refine their creative abilities, collaborative skills and academic knowledge with the objective of improved competitiveness in the professional marketplace after graduation.
Throughout the course, students experience a realistic, agency-like atmosphere as they work in teams on a comprehensive campaign plan for a real client with real issues to address. The competing teams conduct research, analyze the data, devise a strategy, budget, formulate tactics and ultimately make a formal presentation to the client.
Knacktive incorporates principles, strategies and tactics of design, marketing and public relations through a melting pot of majors from Northwest’s schools and departments of Communication and Mass Media; Language, Literature and Writing; Fine and Performing Arts; Business; and Computer Science and Information Systems. Interested students must apply for the course and selected students earn three hours of academic credit by successfully completing the course.
The inaugural Knacktive class in 2011 designed a comprehensive marketing campaign for Cincinnati-based LasikPlus Vision, and the winning team’s “Eyes Save Lives” campaign was spun off nationally within three months.
Subsequent Knacktive classes have tackled rebranding projects and marketing campaigns for Science City at Kansas City’s Union Station; Tri-State Ford auto dealership in Maryville; Northwest’s Horace Mann Laboratory School; Hy-Vee’s Market Grille; Velociti Inc., a technology deployment company in Kansas City; American Royal, the City of Maryville’s Tourism Board, Farmer's Mutual Insurance of Nodaway County and Ringgold County, Iowa. Knacktive alumni, meanwhile, have gone on to obtain jobs at some of the region’s top advertising and marketing agencies.
Business owners interested in learning more about working with Knacktive should contact the Northwest Foundation at 660.562.1248. To learn more about Knacktive, visit www.knacktive.com.
